Development Update: The WAX Explorer and beta WAX Blockchain are live, and an update on the WAX Blockchain release

The WAX Explorer and beta WAX Blockchain are live

Today we’re excited to formally announce two major milestones for the Worldwide Asset eXchange™, bringing us ever closer to our goal of building the safest and most convenient way to create, buy, sell, and trade virtual items to anyone, anywhere in the world.

The beta WAX Blockchain Platform is live and is performing well

The WAX Explorer is also live and recording all transactions on the beta WAX Blockchain at explorer.wax.io

The Beta WAX Blockchain Platform:

The beta WAX Blockchain is live and is processing tens of millions of transactions and around 7,200 blocks per hour on average without any major problems. The beta WAX Blockchain Platform has processed more than 22 million transactions for VGO in the past seven days alone at an average of 3,323,269 transactions per day, which is more than almost any blockchain according to http://www.blocktivity.info/.

Features of the WAX Explorer:

Provides a record of every transaction taking place on the beta WAX Blockchain.

You can view the transaction hashes that generate the items on the beta WAX Blockchain, as well as the transaction hashes for each transfer event.

See a visual representation of all items traded.

Users can search for their items using “Find My Items” or on the “All Activities” page.

Users can drill down into the details of a transaction and see the Item Genesis Transaction Details, Block Details, and Ownership Details.

For now, most transactions are VGO Skins, as that is the first project to use the alpha and then the beta WAX Blockchain for all trading (and subsequently became the #1 DApp in the world).

The WAX Explorer is in the MVP (minimum viable product) phase, so expect many more features to be added over the coming weeks and months, which we’ll be sharing with the community.

After determining the evaluation criteria, researching each of the considered chains, analyzing features of those chains based on the evaluation criteria and building peer-to-peer networks, we selected a variant of EOS as the base platform for WAX. Building a version of the EOS blockchain is necessary because while it is the superior base technology for our needs, EOS doesn’t support all features of the WAX Platform including Guilds, voting mechanisms for dispute resolution, and others.

Much has happened since.

We are building a marketplace platform that must withstand transaction pressures of high-volume e-commerce system. WAX has extremely high standards for security, reliability, and speed. And so, Dan Larimer’s DPoS as the consensus algorithm for the WAX Blockchain is a natural fit for our project. Only the DPoS mechanism can get us close enough to performance characteristics necessary for such system to work well - powering a real-world e-commerce experience where customers expect very quick response under massive system load.

We believe in EOS, and we remain fully confident that our decision earlier this year to build the WAX Blockchain as a variant of EOS is the correct choice. However, EOS has experienced several issues since the mainnet launch, mainly in the area of governance. Governance of course is a legitimate business concern for us, for WAX customers, and for any party running guilds. Therefore its execution must be impeccable for the sake of all involved.

Going into the development of the WAX Blockchain, we always intended to use EOS’s governance model. We have realized since the launch of the beta WAX Blockchain that based on our findings, EOS’s governance model isn’t yet in a state that we’re comfortable launching based on.

For these reasons, it is prudent to delay the launch of the public WAX Blockchain and protocol token until we’re confident that the governance issues have been resolved or until we develop and build our own governance model, expected in Q2 2019.

By no means are we faulting EOS for the governance issues. EOS is a platform that launched in just one year, in a world where it typically requires years to be in perfect order. Unforeseen challenges are a byproduct of innovation, and the speed at which EOS is building and improving their product is remarkable.

Since governance is so mission-critical, it must be absolutely bulletproof. We require rigorous internal testing before pushing our own code live and need to see the network battle-tested for a minimum of a few months. When compared to development timelines for products like Windows, UNIX, MacOS, iOS, Android that took many years, a few months is lightning-fast.

This will ultimately benefit the WAX community in the long run because its value comes from building value from the ground up with:

Trust: WAX traders, buyer and sellers want to know their items and funds are safe

Speed: Fast transaction speed must be predictable and consistent

Scalability: More participants in the ecosystem must experience the same quality during peak usage times

Transparency: The rules of the WAX platform should be clear for its participants to take advantage of

Without these characteristics, no platform can expect to truly capture the value possible with millions of traders around the world who require a solution for their desire to safely buy, sell, trade, and rent virtual items. With these characteristics intact, we expect WAX to continue to grow at breakneck pace and continue to be a leader in marketplaces globally.

We will continue to do our best to contribute our experience and knowledge to those goals for the greater EOS community where possible. As we continue to develop towards this aim, please stay tuned and continue to support the EOS community as we do. The future is bright.

Coming up: A series of new exciting new products and projects from the Worldwide Asset eXchange

These are exciting times for WAX, with many projects in various stages of development. We have several major products launching on the beta WAX Blockchain in the near future, and four that launched this month:

Now live:

WAX RNG: This was one of the core components of the WAX Blockchain platform that went live in June 2018. WAX Random Number Generator is used to provide blockchain item genesis services to WAX NFTs.

WAX.io: On Tuesday 10/16/18 we re-launched WAX.io with a fresh new look and on-site blog. Information is now easier to access, and the site is translated into English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian with German coming soon.

WAX Game Integration API: This is now live as of Wednesday 10/17/18, and allows video games to put their in-game items on WAX ExpressTrade. The documentation is not currently public, however if you are a game developer interested in adding your game's items on WAX, please contact us at [email protected]

Status.WAX.io: Status.WAX.io also went live on Wednesday 10/17/18. This site displays and/or notifies you when any of our sites (http://WAX.io , OPSkins Marketplace, WAX ExpressTrade) are undergoing maintenance or outages. Click here to sign up for and view notifications: https://status.wax.io

Coming soon:

WAX Stickers: We announced WAX Stickers on October 16, which we expect to be live within the next 1-3 weeks.

WAX IRL Trading: Physical items will be trading on the beta WAX Blockchain within the next 2-4 weeks. IRL cases are coming soon as well. More details will follow on this. With this also comes a new public API.

WAX AllAccess: WAX AllAccess is a simple, secure, and convenient way to login to websites. With your WAX AllAccess account, you can easily log into any website that supports it by simply entering your username and password.

WAX Keyboard: Trade or gift items as easily as sending an emoji. With this mobile app that’s powered by WAX ExpressTrade, you can send and trade WAX Stickers and other items that trade on WAX to other WAX Keyboard users.

WAX Mobile App: This is an app that supports WAX ExpressTrade. One notable feature is that it will feature WAX Sticker designs as emojis. Any WAX Stickers that you own can be sent in messaging apps and chats the way that you’re used to sending emojis. The rarity of some WAX Stickers means that only you might have access to a rare emoji.

WAX Marketplace: Anyone will be able to set up a marketplace similar to OPSkins.com. Items are listed on the WAX Blockchain, and the commission on the sale of an item is split between the site that’s running the WAX Marketplace and the WAX Token holders.

In addition to this, we have exciting major partnerships and integrations to announce, so stay tuned! We’ll be sharing our progress with you on our blog, social media, and newsletter.

WAX on.

- Team WAX

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Have questions about this update or about WAX in general? CEO William Quigley is hosting a Telegram Q&A session on Monday 10/29 @ 12:30pm PST. Submit your questions in advance by tweeting @wax_io using #AskWAX